by Tuvia Fogel
Every time a wave lifted the stern, the rabbi feared the prow would not climb out of the trough and rise in its turn but would instead be submerged and the Falcus would plunge, in one elegant movement, straight into the Aegean Sea. But every time, after an endless moment of hesitation, the prow came up again, and Yehezkel grabbed the parapet before him, leaving his stomach behind.
Arnulf, excited as a teenager at his first tournament, shouted, “I swear we are not covering less than thirty-five leagues in a watch, perhaps even forty! If they were leagues toward Syria, we could best the time of the Duke of Austria’s passage, a year and a half ago!”
“So how long did Leopold take?” asked Don Sancio.
“His fleet was caught by a long, furious September westerly and flew from Spalato to Acre in sixteen days. An arrow!” cried Arnulf.
Just then, the maître shouted, “Look! Over there, twenty degrees starboard of the bow!”
All eyes on the quarterdeck followed his finger and saw two shafts of rock rising through the haze on the horizon, no more than two leagues from the Falcus. Yehezkel passed a hand over his beard, trying to recall all the maps he’d ever seen of these waters, and then said, “I know that none willingly speak of the maps they know, but I would really give something to know where those two strange rocks are . . . wouldn’t you, Friar Vassayl?”
Don Sancio said menacingly, “This is no time to guard secrets or hide maps! If anyone here knows where those rocks are located, let him speak now! Arnulf?”
“No, sir. I never saw those rocks, either sailing or on a map. But experience tells me Candia cannot be far. They wouldn’t stand there like that, far from any coast, or I would have heard of them!”
This time the consul had no doubt he was about to become the hero of the passage. “I know what those rocks are! They’re the Strofades! They . . . they opened up for Saint Mark!”
He ran to the table, grabbing a chart. “The two Venetians who stole Saint Mark’s sacred body from Alexandria were sailing home through here and were about to be thrown on to a lonely rock just west of Candia. But the rock, aware of the sanctity of the boat’s load, split in two just before the impact, and the boat sailed safely through the hundred-foot gap that had been created. So from the one island it had been, it became the Strofades, two fingers jutting out of the sea just off the westernmost tip of Candia!”
“Mmh . . . if that is the case,” murmured the scribe, “this cog sailed out of his city on the day of his feast . . . perhaps the saint is taking us close to these rocks so we will know where we are.”
Don Vidoso’s face lit up. “But of course, that’s it! Saint Mark is saving us from certain death, like he did that day for Buono of Rialto and Rustico of Torcello! It’s a miracle! Saint Mark be praised! Hallelujah!”
The knights complimented him on the intervention of his patron saint as if his champion had just won a joust. The consul danced for both joy and barely repressed terror, but the cog’s leaders, not yet sure how the identification of the rocks was going to save the Falcus, looked at him with sympathetic smiles. Vidoso went down on his knees, but in that position the Falcus surprised him—and him a lagoon man—making him roll indecorously into one of the parapets with a Te Deum on his lips.
The maître expressed his opinion. “If the consul is right, and we’re about to leave Candia on port, we could try to sail a little closer to the wind and head more eastward, which should bring us into sheltered waters south of the island.”
“I thought of that right away,” said the pilot. “But the western coast of Candia is some twenty leagues long and without a map with those rocks on it, we don’t know how far down it they are. If we head east too soon, we could crash into it . . .”
Don Sancio intervened in a grim tone, “But if Vidoso is right and we continue galloping south . . . it’s Africa for us!”
Every thought flew to the African coast, where they would all be subdued and sold as slaves, down to the last man, not to speak of the fate of the mercifully few women. The thought of the abbess imprisoned in the harem of some local sheik precipitated the rabbi’s choice. “We must find Candia! We can’t risk everyone on this cog falling into the hands of a band of Tuaregs!”
“You’re right, Rabbi,” said Don Sancio tiredly. “And if the coast appears in front of us, we can always bear away again and try to follow it south until the end of the island. But if Vidoso is right, and we don’t take a more eastward course now, the pilgrims’ fate is sealed. Give the order, Brother Vassayl!”
“No, wait!” It was Iñigo. André de Rosson, standing next to him, urged him on with his eyes. “It’s true, there are no arms or horses on this cog,” said Iñigo, “and you can’t make a company of these three hundred wretches. But there are still four Templar knights on board, with their sergeants and squires! It’s unheard of for a group of knights of our order to run from a fight with infidels, even if imposed on them by the raging seas! You can’t oblige us to suffer such dishonor!”
Don Sancio needed no time to reflect on the issue. “Nice words, Brother Iñigo, but the lives of three hundred Christians are more important to me than your honor . . . Go on, Vassayl, do as I told you.”
The maître gestured to Arnulf, who leaned over the parapet and shouted instructions to the sailors below. The stern wind caught his words and carried them through the Falcus.
“Hoist a quarter of the main, and take her an eighth to the east!!”
The moment the Falcus came closer to the wind by some forty-five degrees, all hell broke loose on board. The seas were just aft of the beam and cross-waves struck the hull from all directions. Every object, big or small, not properly tied down was thrown across the deck, once more awash with waves. The prow rose and fell; every crash made the cog tremble to its most hidden timbers.
Arnulf gave more orders, and soon the boatswain shouted, “All pilgrims below! All sailors on deck! Come on, you ruffians! On deck, all of you! No more watches till the end of the storm!”
The deck looked like a herd of sheep scattered by a wolf. Pilgrims ran in all directions, falling all by themselves or over each other. Some tried to climb out of the hold, but the sailors brutally pushed them back down. The hatch would stay locked for the duration of the storm, and pilgrims could shout all they wanted. They would be thrown against the hull by every wave, and the noise of raging seas, echoing in the hold as in the sounding chamber of a huge musical instrument, would drive them out of their minds, just as the Greeks claimed the gods like doing to those they decided to destroy.
Yehezkel detected a change of pitch in the wind’s howl. The northerly was still growing stronger, and the gusts were longer. They pushed streaks of white foam down the backs of the waves and tore the crests off the higher ones, slapping the sailors’ faces with them, as if provoking the exhausted, growling men. The rabbi suggested that Don Sancio tell the knights to remove the hauberks they had donned when the cog came out of the Adriatic, in the secret hope of seeing a pirate dhow appear on the horizon.
“That chain mail is useless!” shouted Yehezkel. “It will hinder you if you try to help the sailors, and in the accursed eventuality of the Falcus going down it will drag you straight to the bottom! Take it off and stay calm. Above all, stay calm . . .”
“I could never be calm aboard this cog!” burst out young de Rosson.
In midafternoon, an hour after luffing by an eighth, the fingers of rock could still just be seen aft of the starboard beam, and the Falcus labored over the waves roughly toward the southeast. The rabbi’s eyes scoured the horizon, as well as every part of the rigging and every flexing of the mast. His surveys always included the group he’d started calling his “little flock.” They were hunkered down in the lee of the hatch, pushed up against three feet of wood, none with the courage to push their head above them to see what was happening to the cog. Aillil was curled up in Galatea’s arms, in turn embraced from behind by Gudrun, firmly gripped by Garietto, who was back to back with Rustico.
All were visibly ill�
��one more, another less—but Galatea’s face was a true mask of suffering. Yehezkel was momentarily gripped by the expression of surrender he thought he saw on her face, but soon he was scanning the horizon again, checking that the presumed Strofades were receding in the correct direction, anxious as everyone on the quarterdeck to see on which side of the cog, with respect to the direction of the wind, the mountains of Candia would appear.
Suddenly, the elected representative of the pilgrims on board, a man named Ayrald of Troyes, climbed onto the balcony and presented himself. Friar Vassayl, who almost lost his love of the sea when the ship’s load was a human one, spat, “What do those wretches want now?”
Ayrald hesitated, then said, “The pilgrims are more afraid than I’ve ever seen them, your excellencies. In the certainty of imminent death, they want to be confessed en masse.”
Friar Vassayl, taking the request as a declaration of distrust in his seamanship, retorted, “And why are they so certain of perishing? Maybe it’s the weight of their sins that makes them think that way. I’ve seen worse storms than this one, and I don’t share their pessimism!”
“Ah, but you haven’t seen the situation belowdeck, monsieur le maître. There are two dead, broken arms and legs, water is coming in everywhere . . . your cog will not last long, believe me.”
Friar Vassayl barked, “What the hell do you know of this cog, or any other? What do you know of the resilient spruce of her mast, of her canvas as tough as chain mail, of her shrouds that weigh two tons? You know nothing, so shut that ignorant gob of yours!! Go back to the pilgrims and tell them to look after themselves, and I will look after the cog!”
When Ayrald climbed down, the maître turned to the scribe. “And of these dregs of humanity, what does Qoheleth say, Don Sancio? Eh?”
The scribe didn’t answer, but no one doubted for an instant that he had chosen an appropriate verse.
The maître’s estimation that the pilgrims should look after themselves profoundly disturbed the rabbi. He would never have left the balcony when the mountains of Candia could appear two or three leagues from the Falcus at any moment, but hearing Ayrald’s description of the situation below gave him pause.
“Broken arms and legs . . . but I am a medicus, by my beard! I took a vow fifteen years ago—I swore that I am first a rabbi, second a medicus, and third a sailor! I cannot stay up here. . . .”
His decision taken, Yehezkel followed Ayrald of Troyes down the ladder. Bracing his feet against the cog’s pitching, he patiently reopened Galatea’s chest and took out some herbs, some vinegar to revive the senseless, and ointments against the pain of the fractures. Then he asked a sailor to open the hatch.
The reek of stale urine and the chorus of moans swept over him two steps down the ladder into the dark. When he’d adapted eyes and nose as well as he could, he immediately saw the amount of water splashing out of the bilges and on the planks that were the hold’s floor. Waves struck the hull on both sides and almost every seam leaked, some literally spraying water into the hold. Pilgrims filled every available space, including the recesses between the cog’s sturdy frames. Every time the Falcus fell from a crest, dozens of them couldn’t hold onto anything and ended up in a jumble of limbs on the floorboards, semi submerged in the filthy seawater like shattered dolls.
He turned around at once, climbed out, and called the boatswain with the considerable voice he could summon even with no preparatory breathing. Ten minutes later, as Yehezkel set broken ulnas and femurs amid cries of pain and wrapped them in torn shirts as tight as he could, five sailors were busy bailing the bilge. Pilgrims sang as the sailors passed buckets up and down the ladder. Their livid, angry curses rose to a livid, angry sky entwined with the terrorized prayers of the pilgrims, in a Babel-like mixture that well represented, thought the rabbi, the confusion in those gentile minds about God’s role in the storm.
He tried to ensure the pilgrims were all wedged in or tied down, but there wasn’t enough rope for all. After a big wave that felt like it could have broken the cog’s back, Yehezkel took advantage of the pause and dashed to the ladder. In three leaps he was on deck, where he told the first sailor he saw to cut fifty lengths of line, about six feet long, for pilgrims to tie themselves down. The sailor hesitated. He’d seen the Jew on the quarterdeck for most of the passage, but that didn’t mean he should take orders from him. The rabbi repeated his request, and this time something in his voice had the sailor’s legs moving before the man had even decided to obey. Yehezkel went back below.
Friar Pacifico, a Benedictine monk from Capalbio, had been praying for hours, beseeching the Holy Trinity to let him carry at least a part of the pilgrims’ sins so that maybe, if he paid for them with his own life, the cog could be saved. At one point Yehezkel, kneeling down not far away, heard him proposing the barter in a murmur and couldn’t help himself. “Friar Pacifico, this is no time for a disputatio, but believe me, offering up your life for the sins of others is a meaningless gesture in God’s eyes. In your Bible or ours, he only asked for a human sacrifice once, and stopped Abraham from offering it up . . .” Not wanting to provoke the monk, Yehezkel finished the phrase in his mind. “And he certainly didn’t ask for the sacrifice of the man you call his ‘Son.’”
Then the rabbi stood up in the middle of the hold and raised his voice, addressing the pilgrims. “I suggest you remind the Lord of his neglected powers! Pray the verse in the ninety-third Psalm, ‘The seas have lifted up, Lord, the seas have lifted up their voice, the seas have lifted up their pounding waves. But the Lord on high is mightier than the thunder of great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea!’”
The words of the psalm spoke to the pilgrims, and soon the Latin verse was being chanted across the hold. “Elevabunt flumina fluctus suos . . .”
When all fractures were seen to, feeling himself choke in the foul darkness, Yehezkel went back to the quarterdeck. Despite the dire circumstances, he couldn’t deny the euphoria he felt standing up there. He was more alive, his senses perceiving more of the world, a feeling he attributed to the heady mixture of the danger they were running and the beauty of the sheer power of the sea.
Suddenly, the cry that condemned the Falcus went up. “There, look! Above that black cloud! It’s a mountaintop!”
Candia’s mountains were to the south, and they were downwind! The consul had been wrong, and now the storm would inexorably throw them on the rocks. Friar Vassayl didn’t lose a moment. “Arnulf! A quarter to the west! Jibe the mainsail, and hoist six more feet of it! Now!! We must keep away from the island until we reach its end!”
It was the one thing to be done, and they did it right away, but the men on the balcony soon divided into two camps. Of the first were those who knew little of the sea and believed the Falcus had a decent chance, with God’s help, of keeping her distance from the coast to the end of the island. Of the other were those who went to sea and knew how little a round-hull cog could resist a gale blowing on her beam, and how quickly she drifted downwind. The members of the second camp understood that in less than two hours the wind and seas would wreck the Falcus on the shore.
Despite his preference for words, Yehezkel couldn’t chase away a vision of multiple, savage impacts of planks on rocks. “When it becomes inevitable,” he thought out loud, “we’ll have to let the pilgrims come out and jump in the water. They’ll have a better chance of surviving than if they stay in the hold . . .”
“And so it was revealed to all that the Falcus Templi was in effect a great White Hawk,” said Arnulf dejectedly, finally resigned to his fate.
“What do you mean?” asked Don Sancio, up to that point the coolest of the men on the balcony.
“He’s comparing our fate to that of the Blanche Nef, Don Sancio,” said Friar Vassayl.
Yehezkel thought of the famous wreck, still talked about among mariners though it had happened exactly a hundred years earlier. King Henry I of England launched the Blanche Nef—a brand new cog, faster than any other—in November
of 1120 and watched her leave for her first cruise with a hundred feasting nobles on board, including his seventeen-year-old son, William Adelin. Yehezkel had heard that every single soul on board was drunk when she hit rocks off Normandy and sunk, that very night. Nobody survived, and King Henry never smiled again. No other ship, it was said, ever brought so much misery to England.
Friar Vassayl leaned out of the balcony on both sides and shouted:
“Hoist another foot of that main! Pull in that gaff, by the blood of the Virgin!!”
They heard thunder, and soon dark, low clouds hid the peaks again. But everyone knew the shore was there, where the wind was relentlessly driving them, wave after wave. Yehezkel knew the book of Ezekiel almost by heart and recited the right verse for the situation to himself, between folded breaths:
“But the east wind will break you to pieces far out at sea. . . You and everyone else on board will sink into the heart of the sea, on the day of your shipwreck!”
He pictured the hull crushed by the rocks so many times that the idea of trying to beach the cog came to him almost naturally. The image of splintered timbers was replaced by the far less anguishing one of a keel slowing to a halt after digging a channel in the sand of a beach. Suddenly, he remembered hearing a merchant in the synagogue in al-Kahira, as a child, telling just such a story. The master of a cog, caught in a deadly storm, found a beach among the rocks and threw her onto it. The vessel ploughed up the beach and slowly keeled over on one side, with little damage and few victims. The witness quoted the prophet Jeremiah, and Yehezkel heard the verse again in his mind. He turned to Don Sancio. “Do you remember the verse in Jeremiah that says, ‘I made the sand a boundary for the sea, an eternal barrier it cannot cross. Waves may roll, but they cannot prevail; they may roar, but they cannot cross it’?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Rabbi, but we would need far better visibility than this to locate a beach, if one exists. I fear this thunder-storm has made that impossible . . . is that not so, Brother Vassayl?”